Day: February 17, 2004

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to complete the first PR Opinions PR survey.

If you haven’t given us your thoughts, why not stop by today, it’ll only take a few minutes.

Full results will be published here next week.

Brian Carroll hosts the B2B Lead Generation Blog which deals with matters surrounding the challenging task of feeding the sales force.

He has recently been discussing the problems with bad lead information and the fact that it’s estimated that 20% of contact information changes annually.

We rarely discuss the more mundane parts of the PR Process, but database or contact management today is a bigger challenge for PR professionals than ever before.

Certainly in my day to day existence I have to track more contacts and preferences than ever before. Services like Vocus and MediaMap provide a useful source of contact data but the sheer numbers of media mean that it’s still a major job to keep up to date.  And of course we all know the dreaded bounced e-mail syndrome after your latest press release.

The phrase that best sums up the contact management process is “garbage-in, garbage-out”.

We host our own internal database of contacts and contact information which we supplement with MediaMap. I don’t use MediaMap’s own contact management features because I prefer hosting my data locally. Contact management is a big and important job.

How do you track your contacts? Any tips you want to share?

Richard Bailey was one of the first PR bloggers and it’s now a year since he moved from the practice side of the business to academia in the UK’s Leeds Metropolitan University. 

He critiques his first year in PR education.